Hot Dog and Bob: Adventure 2 (6 page)

It’s funny how one minute you think your planet is saved and you’re going to live happily ever after. Then the next minute your not-so-super superhero partner gets scribbled into a cage. Come to think of it, I guess it’s not really that funny after all.

“Run!” Hot Dog yelled. “Save yourselves while you still can!”

“
Psst!
Bob,” Clementine whispered. “Eat this!”

She tossed me the leftover half of her peanut butter, banana, avocado, red pepper, onion, ham, chocolate chip, cream cheese,
raisin, alfalfa sprout and extra hot horseradish on rye bread sandwich. At first I was clueless. But then I understood. Clementine eats radically weird sandwiches every single day of her life, so her stomach is used to the stuff. But my digestive system is used to a simpler diet. I only eat normal things, like peanuts and pasta. So I don’t exactly, uh, do
well
with that kind of unusual food combination.

Clementine’s sandwich slid down my throat and landed like a rock in my stomach. Freaky, loud rumbling noises gurgled in my gut. Before long the desired effect of our experiment was produced.

“Jeez Louise!” Clementine gagged as she was blown over by my stinky blast of wind. “I take it back! I choose the end of the world!”

“Look!” I said, pointing at the Scribbler, who was rolling around on the floor.

“Phooey! You stinky party poopers!” He gasped. “This planet could have been so beautiful! It could have been my greatest masterpiece! You’ve ruined everythingggg!”

And that was that. He couldn’t handle the smell of the gas I’d passed for one more second. He was a lifeless little stick of wood, just exactly like a pencil is supposed to be.

“Fantastic!” said Hot Dog.

“Yes!” Clementine and I said, high-fiving each other with one hand and holding our shirts over our noses with the other.

It took a while to erase a big enough hole in the cage for Hot Dog to squeeze out, but we did it. Then we sharpened the Scribbler into nothingness. Don’t ask me how, but as soon as the Scribbler was gone, our classmates reappeared.

“Sick!” said Barfalot. “Who cut the cheese?”

“It’s sad,” sighed Clementine. “He was so much more pleasant when he was a pile of eraser dust.”

“Pleasure workin’ with you, as always,” Hot Dog said with a salute.

“I’ll see you on our next mission!”

And then it was total déjà vu. Just like last time, Hot Dog pushed his secret everybody-forgets-everything magic-sparkle rain-shower button and disappeared into thin air. And just like last time, his mysterious forgetting shower worked on everybody but Clementine and me. We got to remember every single sick, slimy, scribbly detail.

Just then Miss Lamphead and Marybell returned. “You’ll all be delighted to know Nurse
Bunyan says Marybell is going to be fine,” Miss Lamphead announced as she opened the door.

I looked around the classroom. It was so weird, like no time had passed at all. All the kids were sitting at their desks with people heads instead of animal heads. They were holding regular pencils instead of scary evil alien ones. And nobody but Clementine and me had any idea that the world had been moments away from being completely erased forever.

As an award-winning investigative reporter specializing in extraterrestrial activity,
L. Bob Rovetch
has spent hundreds of hours interviewing Bob and helping him record his amazing but true adventures. Ms. Rovetch lives across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco with two perfect children and plenty of pets.

Dave Whamond
wanted to be a cartoonist ever since he could pick up a crayon. During math classes he would doodle in the margin of his papers. One math teacher warned him, “You’d better spend more time on your math and less time cartooning. You can’t make a living drawing funny pictures.” Today Dave has a syndicated daily comic strip, called
Reality Check.
Dave has one wife, two kids, one dog, and one kidney. They all live together in Calgary, Alberta.